Who hasn't, at some stage of their lives, come across one of those scandalous, tattered paperbacks, much-thumbed and dog-eared with lurid titles and yet more lurid cover illustrations? After years of being buried under mattresses or hidden at the back of bookcases, they are finally making a comeback. Ranging from deeply offensive to outrageously camp, from political incorrectness on a scale never previously encountered to side-splitting and entirely unintentional humour, these books are a well-hidden treasure of Western culture.

After years of being buried under mattresses or hidden at the back of bookcases, some of the most lurid cover illustrations are making a comeback. Ranging from offensive to camp, from political incorrectness to humorous, this collection reveals some hidden treasures of Western culture.

2007-09-28 Hot stuff at the bottom

Like other books about popular visual culture this one has plenty of paperback covers that seen singularly would be of no interest but gather lots of them together and a certain fascination is created. It has to be said though that these covers really are the bottom of the creative barrel. Sold as they were in an exclusive male environment in cities big and small across the US I wonder why some of the publishers went to the unnecessary trouble of having full coloured covers when black and one other colour seemed to work fine.

All of the covers are illustrative allowing artists plenty of creative anatomical scope but there is nothing overtly porno here, more titillation to get the buyers mind to do the selling job. Author Goss contributes a reasonable overview of the market and the principal usual suspects and you even get to see a rather comprehensive bibliography of the paperback market. The thing that did interest me though was an intriguing three pages at the back of the book: the house style manual for Greenleaf Classics, dated 1969. Somehow it seems a contradiction to have a style guide for authors writing such down-market stuff but here it is, full of the right and wrong way to write porn.

If you are interested in this little corner of pop culture have a look at these other books that feature covers: 'Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1949-1969', 'Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback', and 'Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties'. I thought Queer Pulp was the most interesting and nicely designed, too.